Most Americans continue to be
suspicious of government. That distrust is deeply etched in our culture
and traditions. Our system of government was devised by people who
distrusted government and intentionally created checks and balances,
three separate branches, and almost insuperable odds against getting big
things done. The period extending from 1933 to 1965 — the New Deal and
the Great Society — was an historical aberration from that long
tradition, animated by the unique crises of the Great Depression and
World War II, and the social cohesion that flowed from them for another
generation. Ronald Reagan merely picked up where Calvin Coolidge and
Herbert Hoover left off.But Reagan's view of government as the
problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health
care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather
than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on
global corporations and financial institutions with no particular
loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and
dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the
only entity that can look out for our interests.We will not
return to the New Deal or the Great Society, but nor will we continue to
wallow in the increasingly obsolete Reagan view that we don't need a
strong and competent government. Today's vote confirms our hope that we
can have both strength and competence in Washington. It is an audacious
hope, but we have no choice.
This is a pretty good
summary of a theme I've been exploring from different angles. The small
government mindset has deeply ingrained patterns of thinking on the
cultural right, but they no longer make any sense. I understand the
fantasy that animates the small-government types. I really do. I'm
enough of a Romantic with anarchic tendencies to feel the loss of the
de-centered, local, face-to-face community life that conservatives
lament. But that de-centered world is gone–or rather it has to be
retrieved, but in such a way that embraces a certain level of
centralization.
My argument here for years is that social democracy allows that, if
it's understood within the context of the principle of subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity allows for as much local political and cultural freedom as
possible while at the same time operating within a larger national, and
eventually (let's face it) global, governmental framework. It's not
either the either/or of classic liberalism versus classic socialism–and
the New Deal is just a name we give to the way Americans figured out
how to find the balance between them. The crisis of the'30s might have
forced us to figure it out, but we shouldn't forget what we learned, and
Reaganism represents that forgetting. It is a reversion to a
19th-century mindset that people might feel a certain comfort in, but
which is no longer adapted to the real world in which we live.
So
I agree and disagree with Reich when he says we "will not return to the
New Deal or the Great Society." I agree to the extent that reversion is
never a good idea, but disagree to the extent that the New Deal and
Great Society represent something dynamic and adaptable in the American
Soul. The New Deal and Great Societies are not some ends in themselves
whose programs need to preserved at all costs. Those programs are
provisional effects of that pragmatic, adaptable Whiggish strain within
the American tradition to deal with the world as it is. Its solutions
are by their very nature experimental and temporary, because they must
be adjusted to adapt to the world as the world changes.
They must
be continuously evaluated concerning whether they are working,
whether they are worth the cost. But there's a difference between
adjusting and dismantling, and Reaganism is born of a destructive,
regressive impulse to dismantle what works and to live in a
dysfunctional bunker fantasy. That values constellation simply no longer
has any legitimacy.
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